Unseasonably warm weather continues here in the North Country. A mild November has given way to a mild December. Instead of snow we have days of fog, gray skies, and brown grass.

This winter I am reading and re-reading Thoreau with an eye to arriving next spring in different place: poetically, philosophically, and ontologically.

Ontology is a word I hear seldom in my work-a-day world (read that never), where once it was such a prevalent word in all my worlds: work, academic, and reading.

For the American thinker especially, Nature is the natural (pun intended) starting place to begin to talk about philosophy and theology, about being itself. Nature and our relationship with Nature… the dance of being that is our spiritual and artistic font.

Reading Thoreau in the winter is like spending the summer in the wilderness. It is restorative and re-creative. It is an intellectual pilgrimage, The Way of Nature.

This week, a few brief quotes about trees and water.

Enjoy!

 

On Trees
I stopped short in the path today to admire how the trees grow up without forethought regardless of the time and circumstances. They do not wait as men do— now is the golden age of the sapling— Earth, air, sun, and rain, are occasion enough….

On Lakes and Rivers
I should wither and dry up if it were not for lakes and rivers. I am conscious that my body derives its genesis from their waters, as much as the muskrat or the herbage on their brink. The thought of Walden in the woods yonder makes me supple jointed and limber for the duties of the day. Sometimes I thirst for it. There it lies all the year reflecting the sky— and from its surface there seems to go up a pillar of ether, which bridges over the space between earth and heaven. Water seems a middle element between earth and air. The most fluid in which man can float. Across the surface of every lake there sweeps a hushed music.

 

 

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MontanaWriter has been on an unplanned holiday of sorts. A stepping back and a stepping away.

While a successful blog strategy is dependent on consistent and regular postings, writing – at least for me – is dependent on… an emptied and rested mind.

Life at middle age seems a series of obligations. Obligations that overwhelm, that take energy and focus away from what we most want to be mindful of. Under the burden of obligation, imagination’s fires cool, the spirit becomes restless, horizons diminish.

For the artistic personality, it is difficult to separate imagination and the spiritual… even for those of us who are trained theologians. Maybe especially for those of us who are trained theologians. It brings to mind what Yeats wrote in the poem “The Choice”:

The intellect of man is forced to choose
perfection of the life, or of the work,
And if it take the second must refuse
A heavenly mansion, raging in the dark.

A number of years ago I became Catholic. I became Catholic because that is all I could do. A lifetime of reading and writing, of taking words as seriously as a man can take words taught me that words are too ephemeral to hang much of your faith on.

The Protestant bible is an onion. Try as you might to peel back the layers of the words but in the end you will find only stories told and re-told, then written down and copied from imperfect manuscript to imperfect manuscript, then translated and translated again. In the end, each word is simply a guess at a meaning that has long ago slipped away.

There should be nothing scary in this realization. That is why we have the sacraments. Water is water. Bread is bread. Wine is wine. Marriage is… well, more fluid than the rest of the sacraments. But that is a discussion for different days.

For today it is enough to say that faith cannot rely on words. If words were enough, Jesus would simply have written and disseminated his own books in his own hand instead of relying on others to pass things along so imperfectly in so many languages and letters and gospels.

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A restless mind means a thousand interests and a thousand different things to “put into the hopper.”

Here are some articles and links to articles that I have been reading and thinking about this past week and this weekend.

Check a few of them out!

Occupy Wall Street

“Four Weeks on Wall Street” by Michael Greenberg
Michael Greenberg, in the New York Review of Books gives a nice synopsis of the Occupy Wall Street movement. I cannot deny my sympathies with the ideas behind the movement. At some point it seems to me that there needs to be a reawakening in this country… it would require though a merger between the Tea Party folks and this group. The Tea Party folks are right when they say that too many of our resources are being hijacked by the government. They are right to be bitter that people with tax-payer funded jobs get better tax-payer funded salaries, better tax-payer funded benefits, and better tax-payer funded retirement options than ordinary American could ever even hope to have. There is something wrong with this picture. They are wrong however in thinking that somehow cutting capital gains taxes and estate taxes for the wealthy is the solution to anything other than giving even more money to the one-per-centers.  What we know is that in our current two-party system, people with common interests are kept politically divided so that a class system that benefits a very small percentage of people who call themselves Democrats or Republicans can be allowed to flourish.

“Jesus’ View of Poverty: Is the Right Clueless” by Jeneé Desmond-Harris
Justice to the poor is as essential to the Christian message as anything, and yet as this brief article and video reminds us, the “religious right” in this country seems consistently on the wrong side of justice issues. The problem is the combination of textual literalism, of course, and our two-party system. Because of Roe vs. Wade American Catholic and Protestant working-class voters found themselves in the 1970s having to abandon the true party of the working class. With the Republican agenda for life issues… they had to swallow a whole host of economic bullshit that ultimately favors the rich and ignores the poor. And so we arrive at the place where working-class people underwater on their mortgages and losing their jobs have come to believe that estate taxes somehow harm them. Their Calvinistic roots leading them to believe that somehow your economic station in this life reflects your salvation in the next. Even American Catholics who should know better have become duped and lost their way.

“U.S. Marine Embarrasses NYPD” by David Gomez
Here is a great video of a U.S. Marine confronting New York’s finest who have apparently forgotten that this is the United States of America and not some fascist dictatorship. He even manages to shame some cops who apparently have been taking delight in roughing up peaceful protesters.

 Biblical Literalists vs. Scientific Literalists

“Stop With Your Impossible Bible, Already (part 1)”
A new book called The Bible Made impossible by Christian Smith is reviewed on the blog Storied Theology. Touching on the difficulties inherent in textual literalism of the biblical kind, Smith addresses the obvious dilemma Protestants of all stripes encounter with their “Word alone” theology. A quick read of the comments also shows that no amount of light will ever help someone who really just wants to stay where they are benighted in their own ignorance. So let me see if I can help, “Hey, biblical literalism does not and cannot work!”

“Why Evolution is True”
Somehow I ended up on the website Why Evolution is True. While I have been struggling here at MontanaWriter to convey how both biblical literalists and scientific literalists of the atheist/ secular-humanist variety are really just the twin children of a misguided movement that sought to divorce reason from faith, this website makes the case perfectly for me. Once again (quoting myself… always a dangerous thing to do): “Evangelicals suffer from two delusions: first, that they represent Christianity (they do not… and cannot, because in almost every way they have misunderstood the essential elements of the Christian faith); second, that faith does not need reason. Secular humanist suffer beneath the same two delusions: first, they have come to believe that Evangelicals are right in their claim to represent Christianity; second, they have come to believe that reason (science) does not need faith (religion).” The definition of ignorance? Not even having the inkling of a clue of how really uninformed you are.

No More Chocolate

Here are two articles that deal with the connection between child slavery in Africa and cocoa harvesting. Warning to chocoholics, after reading these two articles you will not be wanting to buy, or eat, non-fair-trade chocolate ever again. Sorry.
“Child Slaves Made Your Halloween Candy” by Kristin Howerton
“Tracing the bitter truth of chocolate and child labour” BBC News

Miscellaneous

“The Return of a Man Called, EDGE!”
Good news to western fans. George G. Gilman’s Edge Westerns are now available at Amazon for the Kindle. The more westerns available on the Kindle the better. I already purchased and downloaded my first one. Go and do likewise.

“The Future Fridge”
I am not sure why, but this article caught my eye.

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(copyright © m.a.h. hinton)

A restless mind means a thousand interests and a thousand different things to “put into the hopper.”

Here are some articles and links to articles that I have been reading and thinking about this week and this weekend.

Check a few of them out!

“Will the E-Book Kill the Footnote” by Alexandra Horowitz
In this NYT Sunday Book Review article, Horowitz considers the fate of the footnote in light of the growth of e-readers that have made footnotes more difficult to access and more removed from the primary text. Loving as I do all things anachronistic, I am wondering now if it is possible to write poetry relying on footnotes….

“Abolish the Western”
This posting at The Tainted Archive has me thinking about the trappings of the western. While I know that there are people so put off by all things western- and/or cowboy- related that they will never read one or even watch True Grit, (my own daughter was reluctant to finish All the Pretty Horses because she read the first few pages and said… “it is about cowboys. I don’t read westerns”). I say, to hell with detractors, keep writing westerns the way they are suppose to be written. Westerns are going to make a come back because in the end they remind Americans, and people around the world, about what is best about America.

“The Problem With ‘Asian Steampunk’” by Jess Nevins
Like the western, the trappings of “Asian steampunk” can apparently get in the way for some readers and critics. According to Nevins ninjas and samurai are too numerous in Asian steampunk. Who knew. I have read a lot of steampunk but not any Asian steampunk. I have added some to the reading list. I also hope that someone does take up Nevins’ challenge and do a story about Zheng Yi Sao and women pirates. Done right… it would be a great book. Tor.com has a number of current articles on steampunk that are worthy of anyone’s time.

“What’s Wrong With the Nobel Prize in Literature” by Tim Parks
In this New York Review of Books article, Parks wonders… as hundreds before him have… about the true significance of the famous prize and the politics behind the scenes. Its an annual event to question how Toni Morrison could win a Nobel Prize and not Ted Hughes or insert-your-favorite-writer-here. But like the night after the Oscars, the debate is always fun. In the end, what difference does any of it make… only history can say whose work can truly stand the test of time.

“Rick Perry backer Robert Jeffress: Mitt Romney not a Christian” by Alexander Burns
Right now the two Republican front-runners are: an Evangelical who does not “believe” in evolution and a member of a bizarre religious cult who believes that when he dies he is going to become a god of his own world. You knew it was only a matter of time before someone finally asked the obvious question: what-the hell-is-Mormonism anyway?! Mormonism is not Christian?! No duh!
Obama may be in trouble… but if I was in his camp, I would be sending stealth primary voters into every state to make sure that Romney gets the nod. That someone who belongs to a bizarre cult can even be talked about as a presidential candidate is probably proof-positive of how far the Republican party has fallen from its once proud intellectual roots. Surely William F. Buckley is spinning in his grave.

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Pity the poor Protestant Fundamentalist… how hard she has to work to keep her head from exploding in an ever-changing world. Pity still more that peculiar class of psudeo-intellectual agnostic/atheist who can somehow look at a flower, or a baby’s hand, or at clouds building on a distant horizon and claim not to see the hand of God.

The evangelical and the secular humanist: twin great-grand children of the Reformation. The bastard descendants of two movements that fought to split reason from faith.  Two movements forever two-dimensionally imprisoned by their own textual literalism. Two movements that misunderstand practically everything.

Evangelicals suffer from two delusions: first, that they represent Christianity (they do not… and cannot, because in almost every way they have misunderstood the essential elements of the Christian faith); second, that faith does not need reason. Secular humanist suffer beneath the same two delusions: first, they have come to believe that Evangelicals are right in their claim to represent Christianity; second, they have come to believe that reason (science) does not need faith (religion).

So what happens when a group of deluded evangelicals and a group of deluded secular humanist* meet together to discuss alien life and religion? The results are, of course, simultaneously comic and tragic as the article below shows. The results will always be comic and tragic because the two groups will always begin by asking the wrong questions entirely.

*NOTE: Close readers will note the interchangeable use of the terms evangelical, Protestant, and fundamentalist, and agnostic, atheist, and secular humanist. To my mind these are all distinctions without a difference in the way that Black-chinned Sparrows, Black-throated Sparrows, and Grasshopper Sparrows are all, in the end, just sparrows. It might matter a lot to the sparrows at mating time… but to the everyone else, they are all the same damn bird.

 

Article:

Are Aliens Part of God’s Plan, Too? Finding E.T. Could Change Religion Forever

by Clara Moskowitz, SPACE.com Senior Writer

Date: 02 October 2011 Time: 08:51 AM ET

Aliens with UFO CREDIT: Dreamstime View full size image

ORLANDO, Fla. — The discovery of intelligent aliens would be mind-blowing in many respects, but it could present a special dilemma for the world’s religions, theologians pondering interstellar travel concepts said Saturday (Oct. 1).

Christians, in particular, might take the news hardest, because the Christian belief system does not easily allow for other intelligent beings in the universe, Christian thinkers said at the 100 Year Starship Symposium, a meeting sponsored by the Defense Advanced Research Projects Agency (DARPA) to discuss issues surrounding traveling to other stars.

In other words, “Did Jesus die for Klingons too?” as philosophy professor Christian Weidemannof Germany’s Ruhr-University Bochum titled his talk at a panel on the philosophical and religious considerations of visiting other worlds.

“According to Christianity, an historic event some 2,000 years ago was supposed to save the whole of creation,” Weidemann said. “You can grasp the conflict.” [10 Alien Encounters Debunked]

Here’s how the debate goes: If the whole of creation includes 125 billion galaxies with hundreds of billions of stars in each, as astronomers think, then what if some of these stars have planets with advanced civilizations, too? Why would Jesus Christ have come to Earth, of all the inhabited planets in the universe, to save Earthlings and abandon the rest of God’s creatures?

 

Aliens and religion can still coexist

Weidemann, a self-described protestant Christian, suggested some possible solutions. Perhaps extraterrestrials aren’t sinners, like humans, and therefore aren’t in need of saving. However, the principle of mediocrity — the idea that your own example is most likely typical unless you have evidence to the contrary — casts doubt on this, he pointed out. [10 Wildest Ways to Contact Aliens]

“If there are extraterrestrial intelligent beings at all, it is safe to assume that most of them are sinners too,” Weidemann said. “If so, did Jesus save them too? My position is no. If so, our position among intelligent beings in the universe would be very exceptional.”

Another possibility is that God incarnated multiple times, sending a version of himself down to save each inhabited planet separately.

However, based on the best guesses of how many civilizations we might expect to exist in the universe, and how long planets and civilizations are expected to survive, God’s incarnations would have had to be in about 250 places simultaneously at any given time, assuming each incarnation took about 30 years, Weidemann calculated.

Religious food for thought

If God truly became corporeal and took human form when Jesus Christ was born, this wouldn’t have been possible, Weidemann said. [How Astronomy and Religion Intersect]

Rev. Thomas Hoffmann, a protestant pastor in Tulsa, Okla., said that the issues Weidemann raised were “really on target.”

“If life is discovered elsewhere, unfortunately we need to have more discussion about it,” Hoffmann said. “I think this is a very robust conversation we need to have.”

While the discovery of extraterrestrial intelligence would likely spur profound soul-searching for people of all faiths, many of the world’s religions might have an easier time accommodating the knowledge than Christianity, said theologist Michael Waltemathe, also of the Ruhr-University Bochum.

“It seems to be only a problem of Christianity,” Waltemathe said.

In Islam, for example, Muhammad  was a prophet, or messenger of God, not God incarnate, so additional prophets could have simultaneously visited other planets to save extraterrestrial species, he said. And Hindus already believe in multiple deities, so accommodating more to guard over alien civilizations may not be difficult.

Ultimately, though, the discovery of intelligent aliens isn’t likely to pose a serious crisis for Christianity, either, Hoffmann said. After all, the religion has survived challenging scientific revelations before.

“Religion is essentially conservative,” Hoffmann told SPACE.com. “You can put almost anything in its face and it’s going to shake out a little bit, and then it’s going to drop right back down. We’ve seen this happen historically.”

 

 

 

 

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News from the comic-book world seldom makes it into the mainstream press. But in the past few weeks, DC comics – the home of Superman and the Dark Knight (NOT Spiderman, Iron Man, or Captain America) – made a big splash: DC Comics is starting from scratch. They are jettisoning the convoluted timelines and story-arcs that they have been forcing fans and creators to follow for the past… four decades… and are supposedly starting fresh.

If they do it right it will be the best thing to happen to comic books since Stan Lee met Jack Kirby. IF they do it right. I do not have much confidence though that they will pull it off.

The convoluted timelines and story-arcs that DC is trying to get out from under are rooted in the same kind of textual literalism that plagues American religion and politics. Textual literalism you see is a literary as well as cultural phenomenon because it is ultimately a theological one. It is theological because it is rooted in a way of seeing creation, the other, time, and God in a very literalist (post-reformation) way…. So try as they may want, DC will probably just end up creating new timelines and new story-arcs as literal and suffocating as the old ones.

Textual literalism in religion manifests itself in everything from biblical fundamentalist denying evolution to adults in a bible study wasting time wondering about where Cain and Abel found wives. In the comic book and sci.fi/fantasy fiction world it manifests itself in fanboys arguing nuances of Gotham City politics and Space Federation history to the many different generations of the Robin character. Just like biblical fundamentalists, most comic book and sci.fi./fantasy fans are theologically literalists. And even though in this case the object of their interest is the fantastical, they insist… they need… it to adhere to the same literal theology they currently use to think about everything else in their lives.

So will same writers that the comic book industry uses over and over and over again… and the same artists who a few months ago were inking the old timeline-bound Superman, really be able to change their way of seeing the world? Because that is what it will take. I know I have little confidence in their audience being able to make such a theological shift.

In the meantime, I have purchased a few of the new DC comics and down the road I may review them here on MontanaWriter. In the meantime, I will do more writing and thinking about the concept of textual literalism so that maybe… someday… I will be able to explain it better than I have so far here.

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(copyright © m.a.h. hinton)

Thursday’s StarTribune’s front page featured two stories. One story was of the release – finally – of two Americans who decided that it sounded like good idea to go hiking with a female friend in a war zone. Their two-plus-year incarceration in the terrorist-sponsoring state of Iran, a natural consequence to many of us for their enormous stupidity, was finally coming to an end. The other story was of the death, by lethal injection, of Troy Davis by one of the state governments in the world’s foremost beacon of hope and democracy.

It is impossible not to connect the two events. Moral high-ground is a difficult place to stand and speak from if you live in a country that executes people for crimes they may or may not have committed.

John Paul II has said of the West in general… and it is true of the United States in particular… that we worship death. We have made abortion the law of the land… even attempt sanctifying the grisly act of killing the not-yet-born human being by christening the process as a civil right… the right of choice… as if one human being had the right to choose whether another human being can one day exist or not, breath air, make their own choices some day. We have also in our country granted to the state the power to put to death those who commit certain crimes we consider to be egregious… even though we know that the inconsistent prosecution of such crimes can occasionally mean the incarceration and death of innocent people.

When you worship death, you can quite easily find yourself supporting and espousing  logically inconsistent positions. We have liberal abortion-rights supporters simultaneously calling for the right to end the life of innocent unborn humans and at the same time calling for an end to the death penalty for convicted murderers. And we can have conservative evangelicals who claim to be reading some version of the same bible that contains Jesus suffering the death penalty on the cross calling for the end to abortions but sanctioning the death penalty. Such intellectual inconsistency and circuitous logic would be laughable if if were not so demonic.

Demonic is a word not used much in the 21st century. But there is no other explanation for why a country that expounds such high values as freedom and hope – that does in so many ways embody such high values – can still codify so much death into law… can still fool good and moral people into defending what is so clearly and completely morally evil.

The demonic is rooted in contextual literalism. What I mean by that is that the demonic uses the very human tendency to believe that what is good for me must be good, what seems true to me must be true, what I understand something to be must be the way it is. In the modern American context this takes the socio-political form of the right-wing evangelical or the left-wing secularist… two sides of the same distorted coin. They are like groups of people standing on two small but very different islands within sight of one another. One believes their island is the whole world, the other is equally convinced their island is the whole world. Meanwhile there are oceans and continents and other planets and universes they refuse to acknowledge or think about. They only spend their time yelling at the others on the opposite island to convert to their way of thinking, or plotting how to take over that other island.

Thinking theologically is the only remedy for the people on the two islands… for those of us living in the Red state vs. Blue state country we currently inhabit.  It is the only remedy for the innocent unborn who die daily, for the 15% of our citizens who live below the poverty line in the richest country on earth, for the billions who suffer under crushing poverty around the world, for those living in totalitarian states, for all those who know Death for what it is: an enemy to be fought with every fiber of our being… not worshipped.

But as long as we in the greatest country the world has ever known continue to insist that the world is as limited as our own limited and selfish vision, that Truth (with a capital T) is merely contextual with each of us in own heart-of-hearts believing that we are the ultimate reference point of that truth, suffering and death will reign. And no matter how much we try to claim the high-ground of morality, it will be taken away from us. And the world, so much in need of a beacon of hope and democracy, will suffer all that much more.

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Backyard Saint (copyright © m.a.h. hinton)

When I began MontanWriter a year and a half ago, I had in my mind two vague notions. One, I wanted to create a space to think and write about poetry and literature. That, for better or worse, I have accomplished.

The second idea I had was to create a space to “think theologically” about  culture, art, politics, poetry, literature and the world. That part of the original vision for MontanaWriter, I have struggled with mightily.

The reason for this is quite simple: in the modern American context religious and political polarizations seem to lead inevitably to shouting matches, invectives, and hurt feelings. I have within my concentric and inter-connecting circles of friends, coworkers, and acquaintances: conservative Republicans and liberal Democrats, Fox News watchers and Fox News detractors, conservative Catholics and conservative Evangelicals, Agnostics and Atheists. I value and like most all of them.

Writing about poetry will never be controversial except to a few other poets. No one emails me to challenge my views on MFA programs and writing schools, or my insistence that meaning does not matter in poetry. Yet I know that writing about things religious and political would inevitably change all of that. And so each post that has led in that direction has gotten erased and replaced with something more palatable.

In the end, I do not mind offending people I do not know. What difference does it make really if those who have never met me think highly or poorly of me. What I do mind is offending those whom I know and value.

And yet… I know in my heart of hearts that that is not enough of a reason to hold my tongue….

In my mind I draw a sharp distinction between “thinking biblically” and “thinking theologically.” While protestant theologians and pastors are often enjoining their followers to “think biblically” I have come to suspect that that is exactly the problem facing religion and politics in America…. indeed the world. People are only capable of “thinking textually” any more. Textual literalness limited by contextual relativism by liberals and conservatives, atheists and evangelicals, Islamic extremist and secular humanist is ultimately the cause of most of the problems in the world today. Another way of saying this is: It is not religion that causes wars but bad religion, religious ignorance based in textual literalness and contextual myopia by those who claim religiosity AND by those who claim no religiosity at all.

That is why thinking theologically matters. That is why truly using the ability to reason that God gave to us is the only way through the quagmire of thinking merely (and only) biblically, or koranically, or politically, or socioeconomically, or sexually, or situationally.

It is my hope that MontanaWriter can become a place for thinking theologically. Whether it does or not… only time will tell. In the meantime: Full steam ahead and let the consequences be damned!

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I have always thought of Denise Levertov as intimidating. Looking back at a volume of her poetry I am not completely sure why that is. At first glance, she does not seem anymore or less accessible than a dozen other poets I can think of… and yet she does intimidate.

Theology and philosophy are constant themes in her poetry. Levertov brings an intelligence and breadth to her poetry that demands intelligent readers. You cannot read her lightly or with only your ear… you need to use both sides of your brain.

“Seeing for a Moment” is to my mind a “typical” Levertov poem… not so much in style as in direction or theme. It is a theological poem in the best sense of that term. It asks the reader to think deeper and more theologically about an ordinary moment: seeing one’s reflection, and more than merely a reflection, in a mirror.

Stylistically the poem is deceptively simple: short lines and stanzas. The complexity of the poem, like most of Levertov’s poems, is in the ideas not the form. It is this in the end that makes her an interesting and demanding poet.

Outside my Minnesota home the weather is warming.  The sun stays longer each day in the sky, brightening my mood and making me feel strong enough to tackle even Denise Levertov. Enjoy!

Seeing for a Moment

I thought I was growing wings—
it was a cocoon.

I thought, now is the time to step
into the fire—
it was deep water.

Eschatology is a word I learned
as a child: the study of Last Things;

facing my mirror—no longer young,
the news—always of death,
the dogs—rising from sleep and clamoring
and howling, howling,

nevertheless
I see for a moment
that’s not it: it is
the First Things.

Word after word
floats through the glass.
Towards me.

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St. Thomas Aquinas

The “poems” that make up the book of psalms were written long before the first century. Yet in the nature of great literature they hold truths that are as important and relevant today and they were when they were first heard.

In the time that Psalm 14 was first composed and sung, monotheism was a minority religion. Most  peoples of the world believed: in a set of gods particular to their culture/family; a democratic kind of holiness that said that you believe in your gods and I will believe in my gods and we will leave each other alone; or in no gods at all. While people claiming to adhere to monotheism in the 21st Century has increased “radically,” in point of fact, not much has changed.

The result of thinking that gods and religion really don’t matter are quite clear to the psalmist. For the psalmist, being rightly rooted in faith in the one true God leads naturally to peace, better life, and a better world. Just as obviously, being rooted into the wrong faith, or believing that faith does not matter, leads inevitably into violence, ignorance, and chaos.

St. Thomas Aquinas believed that if you had a thousand years, you could through reason convince any person of the existence of God and the truth of Christ. He believed, like the psalmist, that wisdom led back to the Creator because all reason and wisdom began there. Intellect and reason were inextricably mixed with the author of both.

Luther, Zwingli, Calvin and the rest of the reformers held no such confidence in the power of reason. The Protestant battle cries of “faith alone”… “scripture alone”… express the duality of reason and faith that the Reformation ushered into the Western world. Reason is used to talk about faith in the Protestant world, it cannot by definition lead you there. Mohammad created the same dualism for Islam by making God so transcendent that ultimately you can only hint at aspects of God. Reason in that religion has a lesser place apparently than even the most radical Protestantism.

The faith vs. reason battle of the Reformation has become the religion vs. science battle of our time. Like the psalmist, we live in a time when most people believe in whatever god (small g) they are born into “worshiping” or they believe in none at all. For the psalmist it is all the same. It involves ultimately, fools missing the truth of the one, true God.

Religion matters profoundly. Thinking it does not is foolishness. But it also matters whether the chosen religion is “true” or not. The wrong religion is also dangerous, more dangerous even than no religion at all, perhaps. That was true thousands of years ago. How much more true is it in our own nuclear-loaded, inter-connected, small world?

Psalm 14

The fool says in his heart,
“There is no God.”
They are corrupt, they do
abominable deeds,
there is none that does good.

2 The LORD looks down from heaven
upon the children of men,
to see if there are any that act
wisely,
that seek after God.

3 They have all gone astray, they are
all alike corrupt;
there is none that does good,
no, not one.

4 Have they no knowledge, all
the evildoers
who eat up my people
as they eat bread,
and do not call upon the LORD?

5 There they shall be in great terror,
for God is with the generation
of the righteous.
6 You would confound the plans
of the poor,
but the LORD is his refuge.

7 O that deliverance for Israel
would come out of Zion!
When the LORD restores
the fortunes of his people,
Jacob shall rejoice, Israel shall be glad.

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